Rick Shiels, YouTube’s largest golf channel content creator, has come out on his podcast show questioning the legitimate growth of the over 50’s Legends Tour YouTube views and subscribers.

Alongside his podcast co-host, Guy Charnock, the pair have examined the validity of the truth behind the numbers after it first came to light with the Legends Tour announcing on their platforms that “We are officially the most subscribed golf tour on YouTube.”

Which no doubt, raised a few eyebrows.

With currently having only just broken the 1,000 videos uploaded to their channel, the list of subscribers they have accumulated tops any other golf tour on YouTube. This obviously includes the PGA Tour (1.4 million), DP World Tour (470,000), LIV Golf (368,000), Ladies PGA Tour (219,000) and so on.

Even from the time of writing this, the Legends Tour has grown by another 400,000 subscribers in just a month…

“Plenty more to come” the Legends Tour claimed, when it comes to the content on their YouTube channel, that consists of mostly pre and post round interviews with players. These videos only have a view count between 99 to around the 1,000 mark.

But the “fishiness” as Guy descried it continues on the channels daily tournament highlights, where their view count ranges in the 500 to 700 thousand up to their highest viewed video of 892,000 views of the final round highlights of the Staysure Seniors Championship, held at Donald Trumps course, Trump International Scotland.

With the duo doing more digging, they also find out that the Legends Tour channel was growing in numbers by the day in the region of 20,000, 30,000 and 90,000 subscribers, which doesn’t match up with their views to subscriber ratio on a usual channel.

Also another glaring fact is that there was not a single comment on their videos… Which the Legends Tour put down to because of the various nationalities and languages they are appealing to they decided to turn them off. Still there is not one video having received more than five comments having turned their comments back on.

This has led many to call out the Legends Tour online, questioning how have they’ve gained this amount of following in not much time (since September 2020).

You can see the video of Rick and Guy doing their detective work below.

 

The pair sign off their podcast clip with “We look forward to your response Legends Tour.”

Be careful what you wish for Rick! Because that’s what you’ve got!

Staysure Group CEO Ryan Howsam, alongside Legends Tour CMO Keith Mitchell, bit back at Rick Shiels’ comments and did their own “debunking” video in which they start early on by smiling and saying “At least they’re getting us out there, it’s brilliant.”

A bit of a back story to Howsam for those that don’t know. The Sheffield-born man started out as a door-to-door double glazing windows salesman aged just 16 with the mantra of “Understanding what the customer wants, and to then guide them and let them think they’ve made the decision to buy” which he revealed in an interview with Nigel Farage a Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton and Leader of Reform UK since 2024.

After Howsam become an entrepreneur in selling, he was bankrupt at the age of 38 and managed to relocate to Spain and get some money from “someone he knew” to start up his empire again.

Always being a lover of golf, he got involved in golf insurance through JJB Sports and transitioned that into travel insurance where he “dodged a few bullets in the early days” by getting saved via an umbrella with another company to work around the FCA rules. That allowed Howsam to get himself selling insurance again, aiming at the over 50’s market and people with medical conditions being his focus.

Before watching the Legends Tour’s reply, here are some key points and remarks to look out for:

Howsam: “We started to get this… “way” … of building subscribers that was working”

Howsam’s goal to Mitchell: “Get to that number one KPI of the most subscribed”

Howsam: “Fishy, a cheat, it’s not a great way to call us, one of the great tours in golf”

Mitchell: “These are basic, entry level, marketing techniques”

Howsam: “The week before a tournament we start to amp it up, and that’s where we spend our money and get a return”

Howsam: “Right now, we are number one because we have got that strategy”

You can watch Howsam and Mitchell’s “debunk” session below where they explain their strategy.

I’ll let you be the judge of it all. But it looks like next move back to you, Rick.